PANOS Festival - ‘New Stages, New Words’

Performing Arts Clubs were able to restart at the beginning of this school year, and many students in years 7, 8 and 10 chose to join in. During the first term, students were exploring a range of different activities with Ms Latter and Mrs Weiner.

In this second term, those same students, a cast of 25, are now preparing for a performance that will be part of this year's theatre festival, PANOS (more information about PANOS below). This means that the Performing Arts Club has now become a weekly rehearsal as we explore, learn and set the text on stage. 

PANOS - palcos novos, palavras novas.

'New Stages, New Words' is an annual project that commissions original plays from renowned authors, to be performed by adolescents. The scripts are developed and finalised after workshops with representative participants from the schools and youth theatre groups enrolled in the festival.

In this 14th edition of the project (the third to take place at the Dona Maria II, National Theatre, in Lisbon), PANOS will present 3 original plays written by Afonso Cruz, Joanna Murray-Smith and Keli Freitas.

There are 49 groups taking part from around Portugal. Ms Latter, Mrs Weiner and Tomás Andrade (Y10) took part in 2 days of workshops with the writer of the piece we have selected, Keli Freitas. Her script has now been translated into English for our performance.

A representative from the theatre will come and watch all groups perform. 6 groups, 2 for each play, will be invited to perform again at the National Theatre and open to the general public for 2 days in May. Whilst we hope that our performance is selected, we are also excited about being able to take all the cast to the National Theatre to watch the same play as theirs, being performed in completely different ways. We feel this will be a great theatre experience all around for our students.

The dates for a performance in school are on the calendar for Friday 1st and Saturday 2nd April, and we don't yet know what the situation will be regarding COVID. We are all keeping our fingers crossed that a live audience will be able to watch. Our community has been starved of live performance opportunities over the last two years. They serve as inspiration and motivation for the creative soul in each and every one of us, even if we don't immediately realise it.

More news to follow about performances…

Zoe Weiner
Head of Creative Arts